Evolve Your Ad Campaigns with Programmatic Buying
What is programmatic ad buying?
What’s the benefit of using it?
Is it right for my business?
Imagine there’s a company called Hot Diggity Dog Food that just launched a new diet dog chow for portly pups.
To promote this new product, they’ll have their creative team come up with an online ad campaign.
After that, their media agency will spend a lot of man hours negotiating the media buy – which is a pretty standard process.
But Hot Diggity Dog Food wants their campaign up and running quickly. And they have a very specific target audience (people with obese dogs).
Can this “standard” media buy help them with all that?
Programmatic is a new, automated way of buying and selling online ad space.
It’s different from traditional media buying because it’s done by machines - eliminating paperwork and freeing up time for your team to focus on big picture planning.
It works by using data and computing power to figure out where to run your ad, and then automatically buys that space for you.
Your media agency or in-house media team can set programmatic up for you. But since the “automation” part is interesting, let’s take a look at how it works.
One piece of the automation process is a programmatic tool that helps your media agency find and buy the best ad space online.
There’s also big data, which could include the customer metrics you collect and/or 3rd party insights on demographics, behaviors, and trends.
Thirdly, you’ll need publisher sites: all the places your ads could run (news sites, blogs, mobile apps, etc.) that have your very specific target audience.
The final piece of this programmatic automation puzzle is the ad exchange. It’s like a stock exchange for valuable ad inventory. Advertisers and media agencies go there to buy media space from networks and publishers.
The automation process happens incredibly fast – usually in less time than it takes you to blink an eye.
But that small moment of time gives you a good amount of benefits. For example, it makes the buying process a lot more efficient for you and your agencies, which can save time and money.
You can also do incredibly narrow targeting and reach the right potential customers at the right time, wherever they are online. That means you won’t waste impressions on a large, broad buy and the wrong audience.
It can even help you do more innovative marketing. Let’s check out how a brand used programmatic to create personalized ads that resonated with the right audience.
Pantene had the insight that women prepare for the day by checking the weather forecast.
So if the weather was hot and humid, these women would respond well to an ad for a frizzy hair tamer. But if the weather was really dry, they’d want to see an ad for a volumizer.
Pantene created “haircasts” – different ads touting different hair products depending on the weather. Programmatic helped them match the right ads to the weather forecast in real-time.
When a woman tapped on the haircast ad, she’d get a Pantene coupon to use at Walgreens. At the store, she’d see a Pantene display with the weather-paired products.
How did this help Pantene?
ENGAGEMENT
Haircast got 2x more social media activity than any past Pantene campaign.
SALES
The company saw sales jump 24% over a 2-month period versus the year before.
TIP
Because programmatic is fast and cost-effective, you can use it to run test ads, too.
Your target audience would be a real-time focus group, telling you which creative ideas work before you spend significant money on your campaign.
DO THIS NOW
By checking out what assets you have right now, you can figure out if you’re ready to launch your own programmatic campaign.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Programmatic uses data and computing power to do media buying.
It includes the programmatic tool, big data, publisher sites, and the ad "stock exchange."
Media agencies can use it to help companies launch more targeted and campaigns.